JustPearlyThings - August 01, 2023


Doctor Gives His Opinion On Abortion

Topics
unintended pregnancies
Hosted by
Hannah Pearl Davis
Mentioned
David Reardon
You Won't Believe Who She CHEATED With The TRUTH On Why Men End RELATIONSHIPS

Episode Stats


Length

9 minutes

Words per minute

191.87

Word count

1,900

Sentence count

119

Harmful content

Misogyny

14

sentences flagged

Toxicity

2

sentences flagged

Hate speech

7

sentences flagged


Summary

Summaries generated with gmurro/bart-large-finetuned-filtered-spotify-podcast-summ .

In this episode, I discuss why abortion is not the answer to rape and incest at an early age, and why keeping the baby is the best option for a girl who has been raped or incest at a young age.

Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
Topics generated with Qwen2.5-3B-Instruct.
Hosts, guests, and mentioned names generated with spaCy (en_core_web_sm), reconciled against Wikidata.
00:00:00.000 Now, what I think is in the minds often of people who ask this question, many people ask it from a good place.
00:00:05.940 You know, they really feel sorry for a girl in this situation and think, I just can't bring myself to be pro-life in that situation.
00:00:12.860 For other people, it's like a distraction, right?
00:00:14.760 It's like, let's think of the worst, most rare possible situation and use that to argue for abortion for any reason. 0.92
00:00:20.880 But let's assume there's a sincere person asking this.
00:00:25.060 There's a concern about her psychological well-being.
00:00:28.620 But what we often get into the habit of thinking is, if she just has an abortion, it solves the problem.
00:00:36.720 She doesn't have to go through this psychologically torturous situation of, you know, being pregnant and then giving to a birth as an 11-year-old child and so on.
00:00:44.960 We can just have an abortion and get rid of all of that. 0.99
00:00:47.900 The problem with that intuition and that line of thinking is that that's just not reality.
00:00:52.280 There is no world in which you can save a girl who has been in this situation from significant mental trauma.
00:01:01.180 She has been the victim of incest, usually, and certainly the victim of rape at 11 years old.
00:01:07.420 There is no solution in the world that is going to just clear that up and make things better.
00:01:12.440 So the question is not how can we just eliminate that suffering, because that's just crazy.
00:01:17.000 And if you tell an 11-year-old girl we can get rid of the problem, you're lying to her and you're betraying her.
00:01:22.920 The question is, what is the solution that is going to give her the least suffering and that is going to help her the most?
00:01:30.600 And when you frame it that way and you're actually realistic about the alternatives that we can give to a woman or a girl in this horrendous situation, it's far less obvious that abortion is the answer.
00:01:42.560 As I said, we know that abortion has significant mental health problems on average for a woman who chooses it compared to a woman who continues an unwanted pregnancy.
00:01:51.360 We know that girls, teenagers, or even preteens who have abortions are even higher risk for mental health problems as a result of their abortion.
00:02:02.960 Having an abortion at 14 years old or even earlier is a huge trauma that has significant mental health problems for a girl or a teenager in that situation.
00:02:14.240 And so all that to say, there's no easy way out, but actually the evidence suggests that an abortion will make things worse than they already are.
00:02:23.900 There's no way we can magically make things better, but abortion is going to make things worse. 1.00
00:02:29.020 And so, yes, the woman is going to have this trauma. 1.00
00:02:32.640 The girl is going to have this trauma. 1.00
00:02:34.820 We have to help her through that.
00:02:36.560 We have to seek justice for the perpetrator.
00:02:39.380 But we're just lying if we pretend that there's an easy way out that's going to spare her that trauma.
00:02:44.000 There isn't.
00:02:44.580 Think about it this way.
00:02:46.180 A woman who is the victim of rape or the victim of incest who doesn't get pregnant. 0.98
00:02:50.960 How is she going to feel and what can we do for her?
00:02:54.460 Well, abortion isn't on the table because she's not pregnant, but the woman or the girl is still experiencing this profound trauma and grief and suffering from what she's been through.
00:03:05.280 It's clear when you think about it that way that abortion is not the solution.
00:03:08.960 The problem is the rape. 0.94
00:03:10.680 It's not the pregnancy.
00:03:11.540 The problem is the trauma that she's had because she has been a victim of rape or incest at a very young age in particular.
00:03:18.760 And that makes it all the more obvious, I think, that abortion is not the solution because pregnancy is not the fundamental problem.
00:03:24.940 When you finally do look at women in this situation and you ask them what helped, there's actually a good book.
00:03:32.480 And this is the last thing I'll say, because it's very easy to sit here with me as a guy talking who's never been through this, never will go through this and think, how could he really know?
00:03:42.200 How could he possibly know and how could he elaborate and pontificate about what a woman or girl would actually think in this?
00:03:52.420 There's a book called Victims and Victors by an author called a researcher called David Reardon, which actually asks those women themselves, these girls and women who have been the victim of incest or rape.
00:04:02.540 And it followed them through. And about half of them had an abortion, actually less than half of them had an abortion.
00:04:08.320 Most of them actually kept the baby. And so he then asked the women or the girls, how do you feel about the abortion?
00:04:15.160 How do you feel about keeping the baby?
00:04:17.320 Now, what he found was that when he actually let these women and girls speak for themselves, you actually didn't get a clear pro-abortion or pro-choice message.
00:04:26.460 Yes, a lot of them who had abortions said it was the right choice, but many of them said it was the wrong choice.
00:04:31.740 They said abortion took away the only thing that could have given me healing in that situation.
00:04:36.740 They said the one thing that gave me hope or light at the end of the tunnel was that life.
00:04:42.440 And abortion took that away. The only thing abortion did was it added a second trauma to the victim and it added a second victim to the crime. 0.95
00:04:51.940 Whereas, by contrast, the women who kept the baby in that situation, every single one said it was the right decision and it was the number one thing that helped me to heal from that trauma.
00:05:03.080 So, again, you know, the main thing I say to people on this question is you don't have to listen to me.
00:05:07.940 And I get it if you don't want to. But listen to the women who have actually experienced that.
00:05:12.460 And I guarantee you, when you listen to their voices and you don't exploit their stories, their answers will actually point much more towards life as part of the solution than it will towards abortion.
00:05:24.040 What do you say when they come at you and say, but there's so many kids in foster care?
00:05:29.920 Don't you care about the kids in foster care?
00:05:32.020 So there's a lot of things to say about that.
00:05:34.500 The first is that abortion actually hasn't solved that problem at all.
00:05:39.260 When you look at the number of unwanted pregnancies and unwanted children, that number has not fallen since abortion was legalized.
00:05:47.100 As just one example of this, they said, you know, in the 1960s and 70s, if we legalize abortion, there'll be no more problem of single motherhood because of women who gets... 0.96
00:05:56.260 Right.
00:05:58.420 They said...
00:05:59.000 Sorry. I know the numbers on this.
00:06:01.560 Right. Like, anyone knows the number. Like, if you think that single motherhood has been, like, has fallen since abortion was legalized, like, you're living in a dream world. 0.96
00:06:10.620 Yeah.
00:06:10.780 But it was supposed to be the solution because, you know, if a woman gets pregnant out of wedlock or without the guy around, she can just have an abortion.
00:06:19.640 But we know that it's got way, way more of an issue since then.
00:06:25.600 Those are the supposedly unwanted children.
00:06:27.680 That's like a measure of unwanted children, at least traditionally.
00:06:30.260 And that got far worse of a problem after abortion was legalized.
00:06:35.560 And so when you look at the statistics on child abuse, children in care, all of these things, it's very far from obvious that any of them have got better since abortion was legalized.
00:06:45.860 Now, there's a whole load of other things you could say.
00:06:48.440 You could point out the fact that it's almost impossible to adopt a newborn baby.
00:06:53.040 Any baby, you know, if you're thinking about abortion and you decide to give birth to the baby instead, or even if you're forced to give birth to the baby instead, that baby will be adopted in a heartbeat.
00:07:04.560 There will be 10 couples waiting for every single baby in that situation. 0.98
00:07:10.460 There was an article a few years ago in the UK saying that, like, the, what was it, the waiting list to adopt a newborn baby is about nine years.
00:07:19.340 No way.
00:07:19.980 You have to wait a decade to get a newborn baby. 0.97
00:07:23.040 Wow.
00:07:24.340 So this idea that there would be thousands of babies born if we, you know, if we got rid of abortion just isn't true.
00:07:30.060 What normally happens, firstly, is that people change their sexual behavior. 0.67
00:07:35.680 It's like the crackhead moms. 1.00
00:07:37.340 So what normally happens—so, yeah, so what—what was it again?
00:07:43.480 Sorry, I threw you off.
00:07:45.460 I'm just thinking about crackhead moms.
00:07:46.820 Yeah, no, they'll get pregnant, and then the state will take them away five years later, and then no one wants a kid that's been like— 1.00
00:07:54.180 Well, so this is normally what happens—I don't know if it's necessarily drug users in particular, but this is what normally happens for children.
00:08:00.160 Yeah, when I—sorry, when I say crackhead, I don't just mean crackhead.
00:08:02.780 Right.
00:08:02.960 I just meant as a mother, they behave as, like, someone on crack. 0.92
00:08:06.560 Bad moms. 1.00
00:08:07.060 So the basic issue with children in care is that the child was wanted.
00:08:13.800 There was no question of abortion.
00:08:15.120 They wanted the kids, and then, like you say, several years later, the family, for whatever reason, is unable to look after it.
00:08:21.920 And, in fact, the large majority of kids in care, the ultimate plan is for them to be reunited with their families,
00:08:29.740 is for their families to get in a better position.
00:08:32.000 Really? What percent of kids would you say that is?
00:08:35.140 I honestly can't remember, and I do want to make something up.
00:08:37.360 Oh, okay.
00:08:37.960 It's generally the—
00:08:39.040 Just was it the majority or the minority?
00:08:40.880 The majority.
00:08:41.560 Really?
00:08:41.840 So the number—so people will say, you know, there's thousands of kids in care, but when you ask how many of those kids are actually available to be adopted,
00:08:52.220 they won't know, because it—and they should know, because it's actually a small minority.
00:08:56.780 So, you know, adoption is actually not the solution to most of this, because most of them are not available to adopt.
00:09:04.160 The ones that are, like I said, are these kids who were never going to be aborted, even if it was available.
00:09:12.260 These are families that wanted the kid and then were later unable to care for them.
00:09:16.440 So what normally happens when you ban abortion is—or, you know, limit access to it is most people actually just change their behavior,
00:09:23.420 and they don't get pregnant in the first place. 0.99
00:09:25.180 And that's a win-win situation.
00:09:27.340 The men who don't want babies get vasectomies.
00:09:29.580 We saw the vasectomy rate massively increased after Roe v. Wade was overturned, because people take responsibility.
00:09:35.420 They say, okay, now we don't have abortion as a backup, let's actually change when we're going to have sex, 1.00
00:09:41.980 and we'll only have sex without contraception when we're ready to have a baby.
00:09:46.380 So most of those babies just aren't born.
00:09:48.140 You don't get the unintended pregnancy, and that's a win-win situation because there are fewer teen pregnancies, fewer unwanted pregnancies.